My mail from LBO is behaving rather weirdly and I am trying to figure out the reason why. Additionally I am on moderation on LBO, perhaps because of change of address. In the meantime, I am losing messages and may not as a result respond to some of your posts addressed to me. From the archive, I see this bit from Boddi:
Boddi writes:
>> quoting me:
>> In the early 20th century, at the peak of mathematical discovery and
>> knowledge, as Hilbert posed his mighty questions, while Frege and
>> Russell laid the firm foundations, there was an obscure, non-academic
>> clerk (no, not Einstein ;-)) who sent a bunch of crazy claims to the
>> mathematician G.H.Hardy. This man became what Hardy claimed a few years
>> later, jokingly, as the only romantic episode in his life. The amazing
>> results (not all of them correct), claimed Ramanujan, appeared to him in
>> his dreams, as the Goddess Namagiri recited them out to him. Given this
>> certain a source, he probably found Hardy's attempts to prove the
>> results a strange hobby. It was fortunate that Hardy knew to distinguish
>> the insight from the process of proving it.
>
> Seriously, this is rubbish. Ramanujan's PROOFS are things of
> tremendous elegance, creating new insights from first principles -
> well, nearly first principles. There is simply no evidence whatever
> that the Goddess Namagiri even exists. Ramanujan did not rely on the
> goddess, but constant work in his brain and on his chalkboard.
> Possibly because he used the chalkboard, he tended to start his proofs
> nearer the end than the beginning, but that is a perfectly valid way
> of working, as is working in a team, which Hardy and Ramanujan became.
> And they were a solid, scientific team, perfectly able to meet the
> rigorous requirements of the discipline.
>
This is utter nonsense of the most disingenuous sort. Of course there is no evidence of the existence of Gods and Goddesses! Is this a matter of surprise to you? It is irrelevant whether the Goddess Namagiri exists. What is relevant is if Ramanujan uttered and believed what he said about his insights (and the Goddess) and whether he believed that that gave him reason to trust the insights -- something that most [biographical] texts about Ramanujan talk about.
Ramanujan was not mathematically illiterate. Quite the opposite. He could and often did prove his results, often in unique ways. But it is a joke to read this stuff about "solid, scientific team", especially when talking about mathematicians, and in particular about Ramanujan.
All this hand-waving about "rubbish" and promiscuity in claiming personalities re-begs the question of your definition of science. What is it that you mean when you write "solid science"? What is this "science" and what is the "solid" version of it? This might help clarify what the mud hut is (the entire span of the results of human rationality, which has helped us survive and thrive in the planet for a few million years) and what the mansion is (exactly that: a mansion... a luxury).
The contrast I am offering however is not between Hilbert and Ramanujan, for the former's new methods of existential proofs were considered "theological" by some of the experts of the time!
More if I ever receive any of these message... it is too difficult to find messages in the archives (or my own duplicates elsewhere) in order to respond to them.
--ravi